“Pop” goes the psychology

A triple bombing hit the main Baghdad office of an anti-U.S. Shiite cleric in the deadliest of a series of attacks across Iraq that killed dozens and wounded more than 200, officials said.

The series of explosions mainly targeting Shiite worshippers in Baghdad killed at least 58 people, anonymous officials told The Associated Press. Reuters, meanwhile, reported that at least 56 people had died in the attacks.

As Iraq began devolving into chaos following the invasion of 2003, Kristol offered his expertise on numerous news programs, typified by this comment from an April 2003 interview with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air:

“I think there’s been a certain amount of, frankly, Terry, a kind of pop sociology in America, that, you know, somehow the Shia can’t get along with the Sunni, or the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of fundamentalist regime. There’s almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq has always been very secular.”